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From the authors forward pp.1-9.

EXPLANATORY

To William Wallace Crapo of Detroit, Michigan.

My dear William:

At the present lustrum of your life you are, and
should be, supremely indifferent to your ancestors.
They are dead and gone and that's an end
on't. Your utmost powers of receptivity are
properly absorbed by vital considerations. Dead
uns are nit" — as you would put it. In presenting
you the following notes I ask not that you consciously
attempt to change your present attitude.
Inevitably there will come a time when these
records of your forebears will have for you at
least a passing interest. To you at that time I
dedicate them. I hope, indeed, the time will never
come when the pulse of glorious life will beat so
slowly that you can afford to devote it to genealogical
study. A lonely and a sterile life alone
can find sufficient satisfaction in the dry-as-dust
occupation of delving into dreary records to find
a name, a mere name, the date when the name was
born and died, the date when the name married
another name, and the dates of all the other names
that went before and came after.

Hoping to save you from so deplorable an
expenditure of vitality, I, not inappropriately,
present to you the names of many of the men
and women who are responsible for your existence.
Were that all I offer it would be hardly
worth while for either of us. I seek, however, to
offer something more. These men and women
whom I name were all once fellows and girls, as
much alive as you are now. They were born, and
had the measles, and loved and lived and died
much in the same way and to the same purpose,
as has been and will be your experience. As
Slender said of Shallow in the Merry Wives of
Windsor: "All his successors gone before him
have done 't; and all his ancestors that come after
him may." Three hundred years hence there
will, I trust, be some of your descendants who
may care a little to realize even vaguely that you
were alive once upon a time and had a vital history
which, to you at all events, was filled with
interest. To call these old fellows and girls back —
nay forward — as living realities is what I seek
to offer you. As vital personalities they deserve
your kindly attention and affection. They are all
your grandfathers and grandmothers, and had it
not been for them you would not have been —
surely not you at all events. They are your own
people, flesh of your flesh, and blood of your blood.
In Japan the old Shintoism made the Cult of
Ancestors the supreme religion. I do not suggest
your adoption of such a faith. Your ancestors
were no better than they should have been, if, indeed,
in many instances, they reached that standard. You at all events are, or should be, immeasurably
their superior.

Yet there is ethical
value in Shintoism. To keep alive and present
in one's home and life the memory of those remote
beings whose existence produced one's own existence
is a form of human allegiance which transcends
even patriotism. Many millions, to be
sure, yes billions, and trillions (and whatever
comes next) of human beings are, in truth, directly
responsible for your existence. The retro-
progression is too stupendous for sensible conception.
There is a limit, moreover, to genealogical
endeavor. The limit in this case I fix at
your "comeoverers." Certain men and women
came to this country which we now call the United
States of America from the other side of the
Atlantic Ocean, from England mostly, one, perhaps,
from France, none so far as I know from
any other European country, who are your paternal
ancestors. It so happens that almost all
of these paternal comeoverers of yours came during
the early days of immigration. If the same
is true of your maternal comeoverers, and I fancy
it is, you are for the most part of the tenth generation
of New England descent and consequently
have two thousand and forty-six ancestors to be
accounted for, of whom one thousand and twenty-
four were comeoverers. You may, perhaps, understand
why I regard it as fortunate that my
inquiries exclude one-half of them, namely your
mother's progenitors. The one thousand and
twenty-three ancestors and the five hundred and
twelve comeoverers are quite sufficient to appal
me, and you, too, doubtless, if you are fearful that
I mean in these notes to vitalize for you so vast
a congregation of dead uns. It is, indeed, only
a comparatively few of the one thousand and
twenty-three ancestors to whom I shall be able
to give you a personal introduction. In the circular
charts which I furnish you in connection
with these notes you will perceive the blanks,
which in the radiation backwards cause such vast
hiati.

These paternal ancestors of yours, with the
exception of the Stanfords, were of early Massachusetts
stock. They were for the most part of
the "yeoman" or farmer class; there were some "
artisans" among them, a few "merchants," a
few "gentlemen," and a very few "ministers."
Few of them were of distinguished lineage. Your
grandfather William Wallace Crapo's progenitors,
without exception, so far as I have been
able to ascertain, are descended from the early
settlers of the Plymouth Colony and the Rhode
Island Colonies, and your grandmother Sarah
Tappan Crapo's progenitors all, except the Stan-
fords, spring from the early settlers of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. In Plymouth and Bristol
Counties or in Rhode Island on the one side, and
in Essex and Suffolk Counties on the other they
dwelt. Few among them were renowned. They
were almost without exception very decent sort of
folk, exemplary and mediocre, whose personal
histories if not of much importance to the world
at large are none the less worthy of your interest
and mine.

Your father, like most people, had four great
grandfathers and four great grandmothers. They
were:

Jesse Crapo

Phebe Howland

Williams Slocum

Anne Almy Chase

Abner Toppan

Elizabeth Stanford

Aaron Davis

Sarah Morse Smith

For purely literary reasons I shall present to
you the ancestors of these eight forebears in the
following order, in the divisions of these notes:

Part I. Ancestors of Jesse Crapo.

Part II. Ancestors of Phebe Howland.

Part III. Ancestors of Anne Almy Chase.

Part IV. Ancestors of Williams Slocum.

Part V. Ancestors of Sarah Morse Smith.

Part VI. Ancestors of Abner Toppan.

Part VII. Ancestors of Aaron Davis.

Part VIII. Ancestors of Elizabeth Stanford.

It is more especially my purpose to tell the
stories of some of the comeoverers from whom
these eight great great grandparents of yours
descended, and something also about a few of the
descendants of these comeoverers from whom in
direct lineage you spring. The temptation to
stray from the direct line of descent has been
great. So many interesting people are collat-
published genealogies of a considerable number
of the families with whom you are of kin; the marvellous
compendium known as the New England
Historical and Genealogical Register; Mr. Austin's
admirable work on the early settlers of
Rhode Island; the publications of Historical
Societies, notably the Old Dartmouth Historical
Society; town histories; and in general the free
use of the numerous handy tools of the trade of
genealogy have, with the assistance of several
kind helpers, supplied the data which I now present
to you. The utmost to which these notes
may aspire is to give you sometime in the future,
when you have ceased to see visions and have
come to dream dreams, a roughly sketched picture
of that little portion of long ago humanity which
by the accident of your birth involves your existence.
The notes may not even achieve that
aspiration. I keenly appreciate the undeniable
fact that they contain much dry statistical information
which may reasonably bore you. After
all, even if you can not take pleasure in reading
them all you will, perhaps, be pleased to know
that they have given me much pleasure in writing
them.

Usage Tips

This work is currently available (Oct 2007) on-line through Google Books. Page 11 gives an index of ancestors. For immigrant ancestors, whom Crapo describes as the "Comeoverers". the year of immigration and the name of the immigrant ship are given when known. Entries for about 500 persons are given. This work exists in three editions, viz:

Mr. Crapo's writing style is a bit ornate, characteristic of the late 19th and early 20th century. Like many genealogists, his discussion if filled with intesting details, but provides few indications of from where his information was taken. There is no index, but the table of contents is detailed, and the "list of Comeroverers" is useful.